“There are disconcerting parallels between Argentina’s catastrophic decade, 1991-2001, [when the IMF repeatedly bailed it out and] which ended in massive default, and Greece’s recent and impending difficulties.”

Greece has a significantly higher debt load, which is why Johnson and Boone [of Baseline Scenario] don’t believe austerity would work. I wouldn’t make as stark a statement and I want to revisit a few posts I wrote on austerity measures and the IMF to show why.”

“The Wall Street Journal has a great interactive graphic that sums up the quakes we’ve had so far in 2010. It shows that we’ve had 18 major earthquakes ranging from 4.0 to 8.8 on the Richter scale. The very recent Baja, California quake was 7.7. In some places we been fortunate enough to see little damage, yet others are still suffering the economic consequences…”

“Colin Campbell, a leading peak oil theorist who is a retired geologist, has discovered the pricing mechanism. After record prices and an economic downturn caused oil consumers to change their behavior, and oil demand in the developed world to fall, he’s now a believer in peak demand for the developed world. We’re already past it even.”

(via WSJ.com) “Richard Branson and Wilbur Ross are a strange pairing [in Virgin Money], indeed. The former is known as a brash U.K. playboy who built an airline empire, while the other is a staid American industrialist who became a billionaire acquiring steel and textile companies out of bankruptcy.”